The County of Wichita, Texas joins several cities across the nation in filing a prescription opioid abuse lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies and distributors for the alleged role in powering the opioid addiction epidemic.

The 59-page lawsuit, filed on Dec. 22, 2017, targets several companies and distributors including Purdue Pharma LP, Johnson & Johnson, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Watson Laboratories Inc.

The prescription opioid abuse lawsuit holds the companies responsible for the opioid epidemic resulting from their alleged fraudulent marketing and sales tactics for prescription opioids.

The accusations against the companies state that they deceptively marketed the drugs’ risks, safety, and use. This thus fueled the current prescription opioid abuse epidemic, the lawsuit contends.

The County of Wichita hopes to hold the companies accountable for the severe harm they have caused across the nation.

“This epidemic did not occur by chance,” the lawsuit purports. Instead, brand-name drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin, Opana, Percocet, and generic medications like oxymorphone and hydrocodone, were allegedly manufactured and marketed through an aggressive marketing scheme to doctors and patients around the country.

Historically speaking, the lawsuit states, opioid medication was considered too addictive and debilitating to treat chronic pain. Chronic pain can range from arthritis to migraines and through to back pain, for example.

Opioid medication was once only used to treat short-term acute pain or for palliative or end-of-life care. However, the accusations assert that pharmaceutical companies began a “marketing scheme” by the late 1990s or early 2000s, promoting opioids as treatments for chronic pain.

“Each Defendant spent, and continues to spend, millions of dollars to promote the benefits of opioids for chronic pain while trivializing or even denying their risks,” the prescription opioid abuse lawsuit states.

Prescription Opioid Abuse

According to an article by CNBC, it iterated that Americans consume the vast majority of the world’s opioids. The article states that consumers in the United States consume 80 percent of the world’s supply, and 300 million pain prescriptions were written to patients in 2015.

Second to cancer medicines, opioid medications are the second-largest class of pharmaceutical drugs. The 300 million pain prescriptions equaled a $24 billion market.

According to the article, the division of market opioid medications is not evenly divided. Although the United States represents 5 percent of the global population, “If you include Canada and Western Europe, [consumption of global opioid supply] increases to 95 percent, so the remaining countries only have access to about 5 percent of the opioid supply.”

Opioid medications in most countries are limited to trauma and acute hospitalization resulting from injuries such as burns, cancer, and terminal illnesses. But in the United States, the U.S. Surgeon General has said that every adult in the U.S. can have “a bottle of pills and then some.”

The Prescription Opioid Abuse Lawsuit is Case No. 7:17-cv-00173-M, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Wichita Falls Division.

In general, opioid addiction lawsuits are filed individually by each plaintiff and are not class actions.

If you or a loved one developed an opioid addiction from a prescription painkiller, you may qualify to file an opioid addiction lawsuit or a painkiller addiction class action lawsuit. Get help by filling out the form on this page. It’s absolutely free to participate, so act now!

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